The Year's Best SF 11 # 1993

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  Largo had blanked every computer in the apartment before leaving, including the entertainment system—but I already knew his taste in music, having listened to a few hours of audio surveillance samples full of bad Korean Ska. No laudable revolutionary ethno-solidarity, no haunting Andean pipe music; a shame—I would have much preferred that. His book-shelves held several battered college-level biochemistry texts, presumably retained for sentimental reasons, and a few dozen musty literary classics and volumes of poetry, in English, Spanish and German. Hesse, Rilke, Vallejo, Conrad, Nietzsche. Nothing modern—and nothing printed after 2010. With a few words to the household manager, Largo had erased every digital work he’d ever owned, sweeping away the last quarter of a century of his personal archaeology.

  I flipped through the surviving books, for what it was worth. There was a pencilled-in correction to the structure of guanine in one of the texts … and a section had been underlined in Heart of Darkness. The narrator, Marlow, was pondering the mysterious fact that the servants on the steamboat—members of a cannibal tribe, whose provisions of rotting hippo meat had been tossed overboard—hadn’t yet rebelled and eaten him. After all:

  No fear can stand up to hunger, no patience can wear it out, disgust simply does not exist where hunger is; and as to superstition, beliefs, and what you may call principles, they are less than chaff in a breeze.

  I couldn’t argue with that—but I wondered why Largo had found the passage noteworthy. Perhaps it had struck a chord, back in the days when he’d been trying to rationalize taking his first research grants from the Pentagon? The ink was faded—and the volume itself had been printed in 2003. I would rather have had copies of his diary entries for the fortnight leading up to his disappearance—but his household computers hadn’t been systematically tapped for almost 20 years.

  I sat at the desk in his study, and stared at the blank screen of his work station. Largo had been born into a middle-class, nominally Catholic, very mildly leftist family in Lima, in 1980. His father, a journalist with El Comercio, had died from a cerebral blood clot in 2029. His 78-year-old mother still worked as an attorney for an international mining company—going through the motions of habeas corpus for the families of disappeared radicals in her spare time, a hobby her employers tolerated for the sake of cheap PR brownie points in the shareholder democracies. Guillermo had one elder brother, a retired surgeon, and one younger sister, a primary-school teacher, neither of them politically active.

  Most of his education had taken place in Switzerland and the States; after his PhD, he’d held a succession of research posts in government institutes, the biotechnology industry, and academia—all with more or less the same real sponsors. Fifty-five, now, thrice divorced but still childless, he’d only ever returned to Lima for brief family visits.

  After three decades working on the military applications of molecular genetics—unwittingly at first, but not for long—what could have triggered his sudden defection to El Nido? If he’d managed the cynical doublethink of reconciling defence research and pious liberal sentiments for so long, he must have got it down to a fine art. His latest psychological profile suggested as much: fierce pride in his scientific achievements balanced the self-loathing he felt when contemplating their ultimate purpose—with the conflict showing signs of decaying into comfortable indifference. A well-documented dynamic in the industry.

  And he seemed to have acknowledged—deep in his heart, 30 years ago—that his “principles” were less than chaff in a breeze.

  Perhaps he’d decided, belatedly, that if he was going to be a whore he might as well do it properly, and sell his skills to the highest bidder—even if that meant smuggling genetic weapons to a drugs cartel. I’d read his financial records, though: no tax fraud, no gambling debts, no evidence that he’d ever lived beyond his means. Betraying his employers, just as he’d betrayed his own youthful ideals to join them, might have seemed like an appropriately nihilistic gesture … but on a more pragmatic level, it was hard to imagine him finding the money, and the consequences, all that tempting. What could El Nido have offered him? A numbered satellite account, and a new identity in Paraguay? All the squalid pleasures of life on the fringes of the Third World plutocracy? He would have had everything to gain by living out his retirement in his adopted country, salving his conscience with one or two vitriolic essays on foreign policy in some unread left-wing netzine—and then finally convincing himself that any nation which granted him such unencumbered rights of free speech probably deserved everything he’d done to defend it.

  Exactly what he had done to defend it, though—what tools he’d perfected, and stolen—I was not permitted to know.

  * * *

  As dusk fell, I locked the apartment and headed south down Wisconsin Avenue. Washington was coming alive, the streets already teeming with people looking for distraction from the heat. Nights in the cities were becoming hallucinatory. Teenagers sported bioluminescent symbionts, the veins in their temples, necks and pumped-up forearm muscles glowing electric blue, walking circulation diagrams who cultivated hypertension to improve the effect. Others used retinal symbionts to translate IR into visible light, their eyes flashing vampire red in the shadows.

  And others, less visibly, had a skull full of White Knights.

  Stem cells in the bone marrow infected with Mother—an engineered retrovirus—gave rise to something half-way between an embryonic neuron and a white blood cell. White Knights secreted the cytokines necessary to unlock the blood-brain barrier—and once through, cellular adhesion molecules guided them to their targets, where they could flood the site with a chosen neurotransmitter—or even form temporary quasi-synapses with genuine neurons. Users often had half a dozen or more sub-types in their bloodstream simultaneously, each one activated by a specific dietary additive: some cheap, harmless, and perfectly legitimate chemical not naturally present in the body. By ingesting the right mixture of innocuous artificial colourings, flavours and preservatives, they could modulate their neurochemistry in almost any fashion—until the White Knights died, as they were programmed to do, and a new dose of Mother was required.

  Mother could be snorted, or taken intravenously … but the most efficient way to use it was to puncture a bone and inject it straight into the marrow—an excruciating, messy, dangerous business, even if the virus itself was uncontaminated and authentic. The good stuff came from El Nido. The bad stuff came from basement labs in California and Texas, where gene hackers tried to force cell cultures infected with Mother to reproduce a virus expressly designed to resist their efforts—and churned out batches of mutant strains ideal for inducing leukaemia, astrocytomas, Parkinson’s disease, and assorted novel psychoses.

  Crossing the sweltering dark city, watching the heedlessly joyful crowds, I felt a penetrating, dreamlike clarity come over me. Part of me was numb, leaden, blank—but part of me was electrified, all-seeing. I seemed to be able to stare into the hidden landscapes of the people around me, to see deeper than the luminous rivers of blood; to pierce them with my vision right to the bone.

  Right to the marrow.

  I drove to the edge of a park I’d visited once before, and waited. I was already dressed for the part. Young people strode by, grinning, some glancing at the silver 2025 Ford Narcissus and whistling appreciatively. A teenaged boy danced on the grass, alone, tirelessly—blissed out on Coca-Cola, and not even getting paid to fake it.

  Before too long, a girl approached the car, blue veins flashing on her bare arms. She leant down to the window and looked in, inquiringly.

  “What you got?” She was 16 or 17, slender, dark-eyed, coffee-coloured, with a faint Latino accent. She could have been my sister.

  “Southern Rainbow.” All twelve major genotypes of Mother, straight from El Nido, cut with nothing but glucose. Southern Rainbow—and a little fast food—could take you anywhere.

  The girl eyed me sceptically, and stretched out her right hand, palm down. She wore a ring with a large multifaceted jewel, with a
pit in the centre. I took a sachet from the glove compartment, shook it, tore it open, and tipped a few specks of powder into the pit. Then I leant over and moistened the sample with saliva, holding her cool fingers to steady her hand. Twelve faces of the “stone” began to glow immediately, each one in a different colour. The immunoelectric sensors in the pit, tiny capacitors coated with antibodies, were designed to recognize several sites on the protein coats of the different strains of Mother—particularly the ones the bootleggers had the most trouble getting right.

  With good enough technology, though, those proteins didn’t have to bear the slightest relationship to the RNA inside.

  The girl seemed to be impressed; her face lit up with anticipation. We negotiated a price. Too low by far; she should have been suspicious.

  I looked her in the eye before handing over the sachet.

  I said, “What do you need this shit for? The world is the world. You have to take it as it is. Accept it as it is: savage and terrible. Be strong. Never lie to yourself. That’s the only way to survive.”

  She smirked at my apparent hypocrisy, but she was too pleased with her luck to turn nasty. “I hear what you’re saying. It’s a bad planet out there.” She forced the money into my hand, adding, with wide-eyed mock-sincerity, “And this is the last time I do Mother, I promise.”

  I gave her the lethal virus, and watched her walk away across the grass and vanish into the shadows.

  * * *

  The Colombian air force pilot who flew me down from Bogotá didn’t seem too thrilled to be risking his life for a DEA bureaucrat. It was 700 kilometres to the border, and five different guerrilla organizations held territory along the way: not a lot of towns, but several hundred possible sites for rocket launchers.

  “My great-grandfather,” he said sourly, “died in fucking Korea fighting for General Douglas fucking MacArthur.” I wasn’t sure if that was meant to be a declaration of pride, or an intimation of an outstanding debt. Both, probably.

  The helicopter was eerily silent, fitted out with phased sound absorbers, which looked like giant loudspeakers but swallowed most of the noise of the blades. The carbon-fibre fuselage was coated with an expensive network of chameleon polymers—although it might have been just as effective to paint the whole thing sky blue. An endothermic chemical mixture accumulated waste heat from the motor, and then discharged it through a parabolic radiator as a tightly focused skywards burst, every hour or so. The guerrillas had no access to satellite images, and no radar they dared use; I decided that we had less chance of dying than the average Bogotá commuter. Back in the capital, buses had been exploding without warning, two or three times a week.

  Colombia was tearing itself apart; La Violencia of the 1950s, all over again. Although all of the spectacular terrorist sabotage was being carried out by organized guerrilla groups, most of the deaths so far had been caused by factions within the two mainstream political parties butchering each other’s supporters, avenging a litany of past atrocities which stretched back for generations. The group who’d actually started the current wave of bloodshed had negligible support; Ejército de Simón Bolívar were lunatic right-wing extremists who wanted to “re-unite” with Panama, Venezuela and Ecuador—after two centuries of separation—and drag in Peru and Bolivia, to realize Bolívar’s dream of Gran Colombia. By assassinating President Marín, though, they’d triggered a cascade of events which had nothing to do with their ludicrous cause. Strikes and protests, street battles, curfews, martial law. The repatriation of foreign capital by nervous investors, followed by hyperinflation, and the collapse of the local financial system. Then a spiral of opportunistic violence. Everyone, from the paramilitary death squads to the Maoist splinter groups, seemed to believe that their hour had finally come.

  I hadn’t seen so much as a bullet fired—but from the moment I’d entered the country, there’d been acid churning in my guts, and a heady, ceaseless adrenaline rush coursing through my veins. I felt wired, feverish … alive. Hypersensitive as a pregnant woman: I could smell blood, everywhere. When the hidden struggle for power which rules all human affairs finally breaks through to the surface, finally ruptures the skin, it’s like witnessing some giant primordial creature rise up out of the ocean. Mesmerizing, and appalling. Nauseating—and exhilarating.

  Coming face to face with the truth is always exhilarating.

  * * *

  From the air, there was no obvious sign that we’d arrived; for the last 200 kilometres, we’d been passing over rain forest—cleared in patches for plantations and mines, ranches and timber mills, shot through with rivers like metallic threads—but most of it resembling nothing so much as an endless expanse of broccoli. El Nido permitted natural vegetation to flourish all around it—and then imitated it … which made sampling at the edges an inefficient way to gather the true genetic stock for analysis. Deep penetration was difficult, though, even with purpose-built robots—dozens of which had been lost—so edge samples had to suffice, at least until a few more members of Congress could be photographed committing statutory rape and persuaded to vote for better funding. Most of the engineered plant tissues self-destructed in the absence of regular chemical and viral messages drifting out from the core, reassuring them that they were still in situ—so the main DEA research facility was on the outskirts of El Nido itself, a collection of pressurized buildings and experimental plots in a clearing blasted out of the jungle on the Colombian side of the border. The electrified fences weren’t topped with razor wire; they turned 90 degrees into an electrified roof, completing a chainlink cage. The heliport was in the centre of the compound, where a cage within the cage could, temporarily, open itself to the sky.

  Madelaine Smith, the research director, showed me around. In the open, we both wore hermetic biohazard suits—although if the modifications I’d received in Washington were working as promised, mine was redundant. El Nido’s short-lived defensive viruses occasionally percolated out this far; they were never fatal, but they could be severely disabling to anyone who hadn’t been inoculated. The forest’s designers had walked a fine line between biological “self-defence” and unambiguously military applications. Guerrillas had always hidden in the engineered jungle—and raised funds by collaborating in the export of Mother—but El Nido’s technology had never been explicitly directed toward the creation of lethal pathogens.

  So far.

  “Here, we’re raising seedlings of what we hope will be a stable El Nido phenotype, something we call beta seventeen.” They were unremarkable bushes with deep green foliage and dark red berries; Smith pointed to an array of camera-like instruments beside them. “Real-time infrared micro-spectroscopy. It can resolve a medium-sized RNA transcript, if there’s a sharp surge in production in a sufficient number of cells, simultaneously. We match up the data from these with our gas chromatography records, which show the range of molecules drifting out from the core. If we can catch these plants in the act of sensing a cue from El Nido—and if their response involves switching on a gene and synthesizing a protein—we may be able to elucidate the mechanism, and eventually short-circuit it.”

  “You can’t just … sequence all the DNA, and work it out from first principles?” I was meant to be passing as a newly-appointed administrator, dropping in at short notice to check for gold-plated paper clips—but it was hard to decide exactly how naive to sound.

  Smith smiled politely. “El Nido DNA is guarded by enzymes which tear it apart at the slightest hint of cellular disruption. Right now, we’d have about as much of a chance of sequencing it as I’d have of … reading your mind by autopsy. And we still don’t know how those enzymes work; we have a lot of catching up to do. When the drug cartels started investing in biotechnology, 40 years ago, copy protection was their first priority. And they lured the best people away from legitimate labs around the world—not just by paying more, but by offering more creative freedom, and more challenging goals. El Nido probably contains as many patentable inventions as the entire agro
technology industry produced in the same period. And all of them a lot more exciting.”

  Was that what had brought Largo here? More challenging goals? But El Nido was complete, the challenge was over; any further work was mere refinement. And at 55, surely he knew that his most creative years were long gone.

  I said, “I imagine the cartels got more than they bargained for; the technology transformed their business beyond recognition. All the old addictive substances became too easy to synthesize biologically—too cheap, too pure, and too readily available to be profitable. And addiction itself became bad business. The only thing that really sells now is novelty.”

  Smith motioned with bulky arms towards the towering forest outside the cage—turning to face south-east, although it all looked the same. “El Nido was more than they bargained for. All they really wanted was coca plants that did better at lower altitudes, and some gene-tailored vegetation to make it easier to camouflage their labs and plantations. They ended up with a small de facto nation full of gene hackers, anarchists, and refugees. The cartels are only in control of certain regions; half the original geneticists have split off and founded their own little jungle utopias. There are at least a dozen people who know how to program the plants—how to switch on new patterns of gene expression, how to tap into the communications networks—and with that, you can stake out your own territory.”

  “Like having some secret, shamanistic power to command the spirits of the forest?”

  “Exactly. Except for the fact that it actually works.”

  I laughed. “Do you know what cheers me up the most? Whatever else happens … the real Amazon, the real jungle, will swallow them all in the end. It’s lasted—what? Two million years? Their own little utopias! In 50 years’ time, or a hundred, it will be as if El Nido had never existed.”